


Impossible Monsters

by speakmefair



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Implied Torture, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:49:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles's mind isn't somewhere to enter lightly.  It's a shame he never thought it was a good idea to extend that courtesy to others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impossible Monsters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ponderosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ponderosa/gifts).



_Imagination, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters._  
— Goya

Charles, like all men, mutant or no, dreams.

He dreams of the things he knows and imagines, of the things he cannot know and perhaps never will, of lives stolen from books and childhood games, of worlds he will never inhabit and perhaps should not.

He dreams of —

_six impossible things before breakfast_ —

Things he should not know, and does, and where he cannot change the knowing. Things stolen, things not his to remember and to warp into sleep's imagining, but things which live within him, nonetheless.

He has always known that Raven's warning was right.

Right, and fair, and no condemnation of his abilities, nor really any desire to protect herself from intrusion, but instead a calm acceptance of the fact that there are things which _should not_ belong to him, not cannot, but _should not_ , because they are not his to even contemplate in passing, much less dwell upon and bring into his daily existence, make into a fact of life that is his as much as another's.

He has no right, he has no right, and still he can never resist that first moment of knowledge, that quiet entry into understanding. It is as much his power as the ability to do so, that understanding; the added strength that learning gives him, the added ability to say the right thing and take the right course of action, based on those moments, caught in the amber of memory, time captured for eternity like Merlin's crystal cave. Things that belong to those who think and live and feel them, and not to him.

Never to him. 

And oh, he has always known he should not enter beyond the surface, should not ask more questions than can be answered by a skimming of thoughts, light as a kingfisher's wing above the water, and as flashing-quick in its leaving.

But then he was already far below the surface of water and thought when he dived to meet Erik, he had been beneath and below all boundaries of sense before he even took stock of his actions. He had known only that he could do something, had someone to save, had to _do something_ , because if he did not, what good were the gifts he had been given, what good was this fantastical world in which he had wings that bore his mind into the morning of illumination?

_Demons have wings too,_ he thinks on nights like this, woken from dreams that do not belong to him by a hatred and by tainted, residual fear that is nothing he ever thought he could experience.

Nothing that is his; everything that has become his. Nothing he has a right to, and everything he owns.

He may never be able to forgive himself, for what he has learned.

He is damned sure Erik shouldn't, won't, can't, when he (as he most certainly will) finds out what Charles has taken into himself, the knowledge he can no longer eradicate of what can be done, of what words that channel fear into syllables can truly mean.

_Man's inhumanity to man._

Charles knows every meaning of the word atrocity; he has met it and he has read of it and he has thought of ways to overcome its being brought into being while he might ever have the power to stop it.

But he has never, until now, been forced to live with what it means to have endured it.

Perhaps he should have exposed himself to that long ago, deliberately sought out the damaged, the violated, the half-maddened by pain; sought them out and immersed himself in their tangled agony of body and mind and soul. Perhaps, if he had done that consciously, he would have recognised that it was no pearl he was diving for, no extraordinary wonder that the sea had so unexpectedly contained, no treasure washed along the ocean floor, but rather a thing that oh, God, yes, was a wonder and an awe, but only in the ways that also meant _terror_. Awful, not awe-inspiring — though it was both, he could still be honest enough to admit it was both — and an error he had no right to make.

Raven had told him. Raven had warned him. He had been hurt, and thought her selfish. He still thinks her selfish, is still hurt, because there is part of him that will always be her brother, will always love and trust her more than anyone else in the world, will always wonder why she wants to shut him out from the only thing that was theirs. 

And now he knows, he knows because he has made the one irreparable error that was everything he imagined to be despicable, he knows she was right, and he was wrong, and he still cannot regret it.

Even gasping for an air that was never denied to him, and something that is not quite his emotions racked with a grief that he has never felt, and a burning in his mind that is too enormous a thing to call by so easy a word as 'hate', God! — that would be to think it could be encapsulated in the terms of a world that has no idea of the power of language, and it is not.

It is not, it is not, it cannot be, it will never be.

Erik is no monster.

But what he feels, Charles knows, because in his recklessness he has ensured he feels it too, is monstrous in its very existence; its begetting vile and its continuance worse.

Charles believes in a world where life can and must go on, where nothing is worth giving up all hope to achieve, where the mind can set itself to impossibilities and win.

He believes in the inherent good of the soul. He has to, he must, he has long since trained himself to truly _know_ that there are evil deeds but no evil men.

He cannot believe that and know the truth of what Erik lives with.

He cannot believe that and continue along his course of action. He cannot and he will not and he is not sure what he is rejecting, only that he is, that he must, that if he lets this knowledge overwhelm him as the ocean threatened to extinguish Erik's life, he is losing a fight he has not even begun.

And his dreams show him all the falsehood of his attempts, for rationality is no part of them, only his own loathing, only Erik's despair and bitter, vitriol-burning vengeance, only memories that never scar, never heal, never close over like the oyster and its grain of sand, transmuting pain into a gift.

He has no right, he had no right, and he is paying for his trespass, his transgression, his stupidity, his sin.

He is paying with every dream of blood and rot and horror, and the ravening desire to kill and maim that he wakes with, words clotting the back of his throat, clenched between his teeth.

He is paying as he will always pay, for his own arrogance — and oh, but he knows that is what it is, has always fought to keep himself behind the shield of it, thought to extend that shield to others —

_Just deeds,_ he has always told himself, and oh, how foully close that is to another, more dreadful knowledge —

_The end justifies the means._

And even knowing Erik's means, even knowing what he has done and will do to achieve his end, how can he gainsay his right to them, now that he too has felt what brought the need for that end into fruition?

_The wood of the Cross is cut from the Tree of Knowledge._

He has eaten from that tree, and has paid the price that is original sin, that with knowledge comes the deeper understanding of the _why_ , that question which innocence never asks.

_Why? Because you were told not._

He has never liked to be told. And he must have been innocent, he must have been, because he never asked Raven _Why can't I?_ , never asked her _why don't you want me there, here, together, you and me, Raven, you and me, why not?_.

He's not innocent any more. And it's too late, far too late, to ask.

_Because it's not yours._

Would he even have accepted the answer?

Would he have laughed at her fears, sought to diminish them, told her the things he had always promised so lightly and easily —

_It's all right, it will be all right_

— and never listened to what _was_ right?

He knows Erik thinks him a hypocrite, that the children need no protection — _they aren't children, Charles, if they ever were —_ from their own capabilities.

— _They still need training. They need to do this right._

— _And you are the man to teach them right from wrong, of course._

Erik's grim face, mocking him by firelight with its impassivity, even while he challenges all Charles tries to stand for. Erik, who knows no other way but war.

Why should he?

_A level of despair is reached, where people are willing to die to punish their tormentors._

Erik is no fallen angel, nothing so beautifully doomed, he is a man of monstrous power and appalling rage, and a hatred that would burn the whole world if he had the power to do so, for what it has done to him and taken from him and forced him to become. Erik is nothing of the supernatural, no more a heavenly creation than any other man. His power is a twist of genetics, not some divine spark left behind from before his fall from grace. He would always have had that strength, that gift, that wonder to behold that Charles can still feel joy in being privileged to see.

But he would not have been twisted into this golem born of man's hate and evil's very real presence on earth.

He would never have become everything Charles knows he should fear, and try to change, and cannot help but persist in trying to change, and knows he has no right to meddle with, any more than he had the right to take on those thoughts and emotions and memories for his own, in their first submerged and terrible encounter.

He made a promise, then —

_You're not alone_

— and never stopped to think what it might come to mean, the horrifying depth and breadth of it.

Because Erik is not alone, not any more. 

And nor is Charles. 

They never will be again.

Even if, even when, they should try to become so.

They never will be again.

_Both monsters,_ Charles thinks. _We are both made monsters, become monstrous, because I didn't have the sense to listen to all the things no-one had the courage to say to me aloud._

Charles sleeps again, and his dreams are not his own, nor Erik's, either. They are something more, something not quite prophecy and not quite truth and not quite fear, and all of these at once, because they are born of reality and born of knowledge and stem from a kind of foreboding that he knows is based in clear fact. They are clouded and muddied and nameless, they are made of something darker and more tangled than memory, more bitter than death or pain, more sickening than decay or blood or bone-dust. They are something more ancient, belonging to the cave of tribe-memory, belonging to a folklore horror; they are something belonging only to the concealed depths of the primeval, to the id, to something where roots send blood up instead of sap in the thicket of a darkened wood, and darkest of all is the laughter within the unconquerable dark his dream-mind and eyes dare not penetrate.

_The wood of the Cross is cut from the Tree of Knowledge._

Charles dreams of a past that is not his, and knows secrets that are not his to speak of, and keeps them as hidden as though they were given to him freely and in confidence. He speaks of peace in the daytime and by firelight, and keeps the truth he has learned in the mire and blood of Erik's past hidden away from even his own thoughts, as much as he can.

Peace does not exist. Not when this is the world that men have made. Peace comes from the soul, and not from ignorance, and there is too much of that remaining here; ignorance not innocence, though it can be couched as both.

He says so. He couches it in words he hopes Erik will understand, and feels despair that is very much his own when Erik refutes him in the words that are his own private terror, the words that belong to nights when not even the moon gives his bedroom light, and all the sleeping minds around him are dark as Erebus.

_Peace was never an option._

Erik means _for me._

Charles knows the blacker, bleaker truth, the one that even Erik cannot quite bear to put into words or even coherent thoughts.

_At all._

But knowing that — even knowing that — even knowing what he is making them both into, with his persistent hammering upon the boundaries of reality, even understanding that he is twisting something that should be pure into a snarled net of misery to come — knowing that will never stop him fighting to make that truth a lie.

Because without peace, how can there be love that is not tormented, not decaying at its core, not savaged into nightmare?

Erik is not alone, and nor is Charles, and with all the thicket of half-truths and untruths and secrets that have caught them and trapped them and tear at their minds, there is also this irrefutable fact.

There is love. There is good. There is hope.

And Charles, in his ignorance, in his wilful belief that he could do right, in his desire to save and heal and bring light into the darkness of Erik's terrible pain, truly thinking that he could do something, that he could be something that stood for good, that what he had felt coming from the water Erik had been glad to make his grave had been a fallacy he could overcome, truly thinking that _what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope,_ — oh God! He had believed that, until he had learned what Erik did feed upon, until he had realised that evil existed, truly existed, and there is nothing he can do about what evil brings to the world and persists in bringing to the world, what it has done to a man who could have been so much more — he had believed that, and he wishes he could still —

But in his arrogant self-belief, he has destroyed any chance of those things coming to life before they were even a possibility.

_Who,_ he wonders, as the sky lightens towards dawn, and the sleeping minds around him begin to surface, _who is the greater monster now?_


End file.
